Leticia Alvarado
Dr. Alvarado is an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. A recipient of a Ford Foundation fellowship, Dr. Alvarado will use her year as a CSRC visiting scholar to complete her manuscript, "Abject Performances: Aesthetic Strategies in Latino Cultural Production," which explores the political contours of abject aesthetic strategies while querying the limited activist convention that sutures representational aesthetics to representative politics. From the civil rights mobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s to the multicultural “postracial’ present, she will trace the relationship between demands for juridical and civic representation and the most popular aesthetic modes sanctioned by movement artists predominantly reliant on social realism to communicate messages of racial uplift, cultural and biological essence, and community unity. Drawing from a diverse archive ranging from the early performances of Cuban exile Ana Mendieta and the avant-garde East Los Angeles collective Asco, to the popular culture interventions of Chicana artist Nao Bustamante and the performative testimonies of Latino Mormon converts, Dr. Alvarado aims to eludicate an alternative political model for imagining collectivities not mired in the restrictive parameters of unity and cultural pride, strategies that have come to serve a postracial capitalist economy that has identified multiculturalism as a valuable niche market.
Ernesto Chávez
Dr. Chávez is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Texas, El Paso. His work intersects Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Borderlands history. His research examines the history of the American Southwest, focusing on the matrix of race, class, and sexuality throughout the ethnic Mexican and Latino American past. In 2002, the University of California Press published his first book, Mi Raza Primero! (My People First): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978, which originated as his doctoral thesis in history at UCLA. He is also the author of The U.S. War with Mexico: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2007). The recipient of the CSRC's IAC Fellowship for the 2014-15 year, Dr. Chávez will be completing his third book manuscript, “Contra La Corriente (Against the Current): Race, Religion, and Sexuality in the Life of Ramón Novarro” and teaching a related seminar in the spring quarter. Dr. Chávez will also serve on the advisory board for the LA RAZA exhibition undertaken by the CSRC in partnership with the Autry National Center for the Getty Foundation arts initiative "Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A." scheduled for 2017-18.
C. Ondine Chavoya
Dr. Chavoya is a professor of art and chair of the Latina/o studies program at Williams College. During his time at the CSRC, he will be working on developing an exhibition that's focused on queer Chicano art from the 1970s and 1980s. This exhibition is part of the Getty Initiative, Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A. that will explore artistic connections between Los Angeles and Latin America. Specific collections at the CSRC he will research include: Self Help Graphics and Arts Research Collection Papers, CARA: Chicano Arts: Resistance and Affirmation Papers, VIVA Papers, Queer Nation Records, Gronk Papers, and Alex Donis Papers.
Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
Dr. Fajardo-Hill is a British-Venezuelan art historian and curator in modern and contemporary art. Currently based in Southern California, she has a PhD in art history from the University of Essex, and an MA in twentieth-century art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She served as the chief curator and vice president of curatorial affairs at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California, from 2009 to 2012. Previously she was the director and chief curator of the Cisneros Fontanals Arts Foundation and the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, and the general director of Sala Mendoza, an alternative space for contemporary art in Caracas. She has curated and organized numerous group and solo exhibitions of international artists and has published broadly on contemporary art and artists from Latin America. In 2013-14 as a CSRC visiting scholar, she curated the exhibition Ricardo Valverde: Experimental Sights, 1971-1996 at the Vincent Price Art Museum utilizing the Ricardo Valverde Digital Image Collection at the CSRC. She is currently serving as co-curator of The Political Body: Radical Women in Latin American Art, 1960-1985, an exhibition for fall 2017 organized by the Hammer Museum at UCLA as part of the Getty Foundation’s initiative Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A. The exhibition will reappraise the contribution of women artists residing within Latin America to modern and contemporary art during a particular 25-year period and consider approximately 80 artists from 12 countries, including U.S. Chicana and Latina artists. As a visiting scholar for 2014-15 and to advance future scholarship and curatorial work, Dr. Fajardo-Hill will utilize CSRC resources to conduct research on Chicano and Latino art to develop new perspectives, highlight key figures, and problematize the academic separation that exists between U.S. Chicano and Latino art and Latin American art.
Carlos M. Haro
Dr. Haro, Assistant Director Emeritus of the CSRC, will continue his multi-year research into Chicano education and the history of Chicanos and the schools, oral histories, and comparative and international education. Dr. Haro is responsible for CSRC’s annual Latina/o Education Summit series at UCLA, which assesses the critical issues facing Latina/os in the education pipeline from kindergarten through graduate studies.
Juan Carlos Herrera
Dr. Herrera received his PhD in Comparative Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, in September 2013. A recipient of a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship, during his two-year tenure at the CSRC he will expand his research for his book manuscript Politicizing Care: The State, Philanthropy, and the Making of the Latino Nonprofit Sector. In his dissertation project, Herrera argued that nonprofit organizations are a powerful vehicle in the remaking of contemporary racial subjectivities and citizenship. As critical community-based organizations, they negotiate how urban racial subjects relate to the state and social movements. His book manuscript expands his dissertation with a geographically and racially comparative framework grounded in additional archival research. This analysis will examine the role of the Ford Foundation in relationally guiding African American and Latino nonprofits. Dr. Herrera will also critically analyze the archival sources contained in the Latinas and Latinos in Politics Oral History Collection as well as the Edward Roybal Papers located at UCLA, which relate to Los Angeles-specific organizations and activism.
Miriam Melton-Villanueva
Dr. Melton-Villanueva is an assistant professor of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A Ford Postdoctoral Fellow, she will be completing her book manuscript “The Nahuas at Independence: Culture Keeping in Central Mexico, 1799-1832.” Her project offers the first internal ethnographic view of central Mexican indigenous communities during a time of national political crisis. The sources for “The Nahuas at Independence” mainly consist of Nahuatl-language and some Spanish-language testaments, all written by indigenous notaries living in four indigenous towns in the Metepec region of the Toluca Valley. Few native sources from this period exist; Dr. Melton-Villanueva is utilizing 156 indigenous documents that she found in rural parish archives. Her project aims to contradict women’s thus far perceived insignificance to building colonial Latin America through a careful study of indigenous social life based on women's own sources: their own voices.
Lindsay Pérez Huber
Dr. Huber holds a doctorate from the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and is an assistant professor of Social and Cultural Analysis of Education in the College of Education at Cal State Long Beach. Her research and publications examine the perpetuation of nativism in California’s education policies. For 2014, she was named an American Association for Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE) Faculty Fellow. Dr. Huber is the co-organizer with Dr. Carlos Haro of the CSRC's ninth annual Latina/o Education Summit, and as a visiting scholar in 2014-15 she will continue her own research projects in addition to launching the planning of the benchmark tenth education summit in 2015. Dr. Huber assisted the planning of the first summit in 2006.
